A DISCORDANT INTIMACY

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BLOOD, CLASS, AND NOSTALGIA

Anglo-American Ironies.

By Christopher Hitchens.

398 pp. New York:

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.95.

Winston Churchill, visiting Washington in May 1943, sent President Franklin D. Roosevelt an extraordinary memorandum about the postwar world. It was a proposal for something like a merger of the United States and Britain. Citizens of each country would be able to ''settle and trade with freedom and equal rights in the territories of the other.'' There might be a common passport, even ''some common form of citizenship.'' Roosevelt, who was not always averse to bizarre schemes for global reorganization, showed no interest in this one. But to Christopher Hitchens, the proposal is redolent of what Walter Lippmann once called the ''discordant intimacy'' that has characterized the relationship between the United States and Britain for more than a century.

Mr. Hitchens should be well equipped to discuss this special relationship. He is one of its byproducts. A native of England and a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, he has lived for many years in the United States, writing for British and American publications about British and American public life. His generally left-wing political commentary in The Nation, Harper's Magazine and elsewhere is often exceptionally intelligent, witty and acidic. But Mr. Hitchens is not at his best in this ambitious book. He falls back too often on extended analyses of obvious literary and political figures (Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Henry Adams, Winston Churchill, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt) without creating a coherent framework for his discussion. He rambles and repeats himself. Much of this book is as diffuse and shapeless as the complicated subject it addresses.

Even so, ''Blood, Class, and Nostalgia'' offers some interesting, if controversial, assessments of what has become known since World War II as the special relationship. Principal among them is Mr. Hitchens's contention that Britain has consistently dominated the relationship - not only in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the United States was a junior partner in the business of establishing British-American hegemony in much of the world, but more recently, when the United States has clearly been the stronger nation. Having lost its own empire, Britain has managed to remain an important world power largely through its ability to influence the United States.

Mr. Hitchens overstates his case at times. British diplomacy and propaganda - and the formidable influence of Churchill - undoubtedly helped shape American policy toward both world wars and may have hastened (and, in the case of World War I, perhaps even caused) American intervention. But Churchill did not play the central role in the shaping of America's cold war foreign policy, as this book suggests; nor was Britain as important a factor as Mr. Hitchens implies in encouraging American involvement in Vietnam. American globalism since 1945, he says, has been a kind of imperial receivership, in which the United States has assumed burdens of empire Britain could no longer carry. But the idea of a receivership both exaggerates the British role in the postwar world and slights America's autonomous motives for moving into a position of international leadership.

More persuasive is Mr. Hitchens's witty and occasionally savage dissection of the Anglophilia that pervades so much of American high culture, and of the British skill at exploiting it. The day may have passed when impoverished English nobles had their pick of wealthy American heiresses eager to marry for a title. But a covetous fascination with things British and the conspicuous (if often contrived) aura of wisdom and tradition they seem to convey - Churchill, the royal family, the English country house, Oxford and Cambridge - continues to pervade American upper-class life. Mr. Hitchens identifies a network of institutions through which British intellectuals and politicians exercise influence in the United States: the Rhodes scholarships, the Council on Foreign Relations (which has always championed the special relationship), the British-American conference center at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire and, of course, the fabled British intelligence services. In every case, he suggests, the British derive much more from the relationship than the Americans.

Mr. Hitchens is less interested in chronicling the other, and perhaps more important, part of the British-American relationship: the tidal wave of American popular culture that has inundated Britain (and much of the rest of the world) in the last 50 years. His concern is primarily with the transmission of ideas and influence among elites. And despite his occasionally exaggerated claims, he is certainly correct that through much of this century Britain has retained a hold on American intellectual life quite out of proportion to its actual power. He is also correct in noting how much of that influence has been in the service of an imperial ethos. Britain has tried to bequeath to America its own sense of privilege and entitlement in world affairs. And the United States, if largely for reasons of its own, has at times been an apt pupil.

In the end, as the author writes, Britain and America ''were not destined to be the lords of humankind.'' Britain may imagine itself a new Greece to America's Rome, but as Mr. Hitchens argues, ''the time when [the world] could have been governed as an Anglo-American condominium is long past.'' America's fascination with Britain has always drawn from a mixture of myth and nostalgia. Britain's interest in the United States, which Mr. Hitchens suggests has always been largely pragmatic, may now begin to do the same.

THE CHURCHILL CULT

How and why is it that the name and prestige of Sir Winston Churchill are so easily appropriated by Americans . . . who are generally identified with privilege and conservatism? . . . The figure of the grand old man is the summa of ''special relationship'' politics and economics. Invested with the awesome grandeur and integrity of the 1940 resistance to Hitler, and gifted as few before or since with the power to make historic phrases, Churchill is morally irrefragable in American discourse, and can be quoted even more safely than Lincoln. . . . Given the universality of his standing and appeal, Churchill is an icon of which jealous use is made by the political and military conservatives to whom the ''special relationship'' is a potent source of reinforcement. But he also occupies an unrivaled place in the common stock of reference, ranging from the mock-heroic to the downright kitsch. . . . In the public realm, there is an almost unappeasable demand for Churchillian invocation. The decline of direct Soviet-American confrontation has slightly lessened the intensity of the Munich analogy, which is the most salient form in which Churchillism lives on. But any issue of principle, or any confrontation with a lesser power than Russia, can also bring the ''lessons of Munich'' tripping off a speaker's tongue.

From ''Blood, Class, and Nostalgia.''

Alan Brinkley is a professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate School.